Managing population and reproduction in Singapore

Despite three decades of pronatalist policies and incentives, Singapore’s Total Fertility Rate, or the average number of live-births per woman, is among the lowest in the world (the TFR hit 1.2 in 2011, far below the replacement level of 2.1). At the same time, Singapore’s economy remains heavily dependent on skilled and unskilled foreign labor, and selective immigration is used to compensate for the low fertility rate among the resident population. As a result, Singapore’s total population has increased from 2.4 million in 1980 to 5.3 million in 2011, and is projected in the White Paper to hit 6.9 million in 2030. The political leadership argues that continuous economic growth is dependent on population growth, but the rapid inflow of migrants has evoked concern among local Singaporeans, who claim that they now have to compete with the new residents/citizens for housing, employment and transportation. The critics’ objection to the White Paper primarily concerns the issue of immigration and the fact that it aims at a 30 per cent population increase by 2030, with immigrants making up about half of that figure.

Population policy and reproductive behavior in a productivist welfare state

The rapid demographic transition in parts of East and Southeast Asia has gained much attention among policy-makers as well as scholars in recent years. However, most studies on fertility decline and population policy rely on quantitative data and thus provide limited information about individual childbearing decisions. Shirley Hsiao-Li Sun’s book Population Policy and Reproduction in Singapore: Making Future Citizens (Routledge 2012) provides an important correction in this regard. Sun draws on an impressive collection of qualitative data obtained through personal interviews and focus-group discussions with Singaporean citizens to examine the effects of and responses to state population policies. The key question is: Why don’t the government’s pronatalist policies and incentives work?  Sun explores the relationship between the state and the individual through the notion of ‘lived citizenship’. Her central argument is that constructions of citizenship have implications for the success or failure of policy implementation. Sun suggests that in Singapore the state’s emphasis on citizenship-as-responsibility (as opposed to citizenship as guaranteeing social rights) may explain why fertility rates remain low despite pronatalist policies. The Singapore government, led by the People’s Action Party since 1965, is avowedly ‘anti-welfare’ in the sense that families, not the state, should be responsible for the well-being of their members. This anti-welfare ideology is usually justified on the grounds that Asian societies are (supposedly) family oriented. At the same time, the Singapore state is highly interventionist and known for its meticulous social engineering, including attempts to control family formation and childbearing decisions.

The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical framework of citizenship in relation to the productivist welfare states across Asia. Productivist welfare states differ from traditional welfare states in the sense that they emphasize citizenship-as-responsibility while downplaying social rights. Chapter 2 discusses global trends in fertility behavior and pronatalist population policies, while chapter 3 examines more closely how such policies have been designed and implemented in Singapore. It becomes clear that Singapore’s population policies are shaped by productivist notions of citizenship, whereby the ideal citizen ‘is an “economically” productive one’ (p. 68). This ideal permeates social policy and welfare provisions aimed at encouraging self-reliance and enabling citizens to participate in paid employment. Similarly, productivist logic is evident in the government’s persistent emphasis on the economic importance of population growth.

Sun’s empirical interview data is analyzed in chapters 4-6. Chapter 4 examines how respondents perceive the pronatalist incentives, such as subsidized education, healthcare, and housing, and tax rebates, and to what extent these incentives influence individual decision-making with regard to childbearing. The findings show that citizens assess existing incentives in relation to high living costs; in other words, whether the economic incentives offered can actually compensate for the direct and indirect costs related to having children. Some respondents also expressed a lack of awareness about such incentives, a finding that indicates the state’s promotion of these programs is insufficient. In chapter 5, Sun turns to citizens’ responses to work-family-balance policies, including maternity and paternity leaves. Respondents who feel that the existing paid maternity leave program is ineffective point to the lack of job security and employer discrimination. Some women even choose to cut their maternity leave short for just those reasons; they see flexible work hours and legal protection against dismissal as more important than longer paid maternity leave. In chapter 6, the author examines how interviewees’ aspiration to assure their children’s individual competitiveness influences their ideal number of children. The importance of individual competitiveness, especially in terms of education, is an interesting example of how the productivist logic described in earlier chapters is being reproduced and performed not only through policy but also in everyday family life. Chapter 7 concludes the study by providing a number of suggestions for future policy-making, such as more supportive institutional arrangements, legal protections, and long-term and universal benefits for families with children.

Understanding the effects of state policy on individual decision-making

The main strength of Sun’s study is the qualitative interview data that unveil how people reason and respond to pronatalist policies. Sun and a number of research assistants carried out in total 204 interviews involving 221 interviewees, out of which 36 were men and 185 women. The focus is on women of child-bearing age, who also represent the target group of most population policies. The number of interviews is exceptionally high for a qualitative study. On one hand, the impressive sample size enables the researcher to examine patterns in a manner that qualitative data usually do not permit. On the other hand, the sample size makes it necessary to exclude a substantial part of interesting interview data from her presentation of the analysis. The author illustrates and supports her analysis with selected excerpts from interviews, but the reader does not get a wider understanding of the variety and nuances of individual responses, nor is it easy to see how an interviewee’s reply to a certain questions correlates to how s/he responded to other questions in the same interview. Of course, such an in-depth analysis would have required an ethnographic approach that probably is not compatible with the methodological framework Sun has chosen for her study. An alternative way of organizing the book would have been to integrate the empirical data earlier—the first three chapters are theoretically dense and full of often lengthy citations, which tend to overpower the empirical data examined in chapters 4-6—or extend the empirical chapters. Another aspect of reproductive behavior that would have been interesting to explore further is the role of gender relations and fatherhood on couples’ childbearing decision-making (the overwhelming majority of Sun’s respondents are women).

Notwithstanding, Sun’s book convincingly establishes the advantages of qualitative research in the field of population studies. Overall, the book makes an important contribution to the analysis of population policy and reproduction in low-fertility contexts, and will thus be of interest to researchers concerned with these issues in Singapore and beyond. It will also be useful and informative reading for policy-makers. It is my hope that Sun’s book will encourage other researchers to engage various aspects of reproduction and family formation using qualitative methods.

Kristina Göransson, PhD in Social Anthropology, is Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, Lund University. She is the author of The Binding Tie: Chinese Intergenerational Relations in Modern Singapore (University of Hawai’i Press 2009). Correspondence: kristina.goransson@soch.lu.se

References
White Paper on Population, Singapore. 2013. ‘A Sustainable Population for a Dynamic Singapore’. Available online: http://202.157.171.46/whitepaper/downloads/population-white-paper.pdf